It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said 'Bother!' and 'O blow!' and also 'Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.

------------ Kenneth Grahame

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Scotch Broom

We walked, at Camassia. A crew of
earnest but inarticulate young people were spraying chemicals to kill
invasive grasses, which had been spray-painted a lurid teal color by
some other (no doubt equally earnest and inarticulate) young people.
We scooted past them at the entrance, lost them and found them again
at whiles. It's not a big preserve.

A path snakes off to the bluff. A
glimpse of three teenage girls who had taken their shirts off to
bathe in the early March sun. On seeing us they grabbed their shirts
and pulled them back on, though we were doing our best to pretend not
to see them, and they were decently clad in bra-ish garments. “Once
upon a time I would have felt bad,” mused Martha, “but now I think
being embarrassed about taking your shirt off, when you're a teenage
girl, is an integral part of doing it.”

The sky was blue, and Mt Hood's pure
white made sharp edges against it. Indian plum was everywhere, its
leaves standing up to fill with sunlight, its white flowers dangling
down. A couple trilliums were trying it on. We met a white-haired
woman who was plucking up invasive scotch broom. She was happy. “It's
all new growth this year,” she said, “I think we're finally
getting ahead of it.” She showed it to us, and I took a sprig to
examine it, and learn to recognize it in its youthful state, in case
we met any ourselves. “Slender ribbed branches” – with a
star-shaped cross-section – easy enough to tell it, once you've
rolled it between your fingers: it has a tough, briar-like feel.

In the afternoon, a deep, aching
sadness. Martha was happy reading her book, but I was losing my place
in the world. Deeply disoriented, as always after the change to
daylight saving time. It makes me feel old and lost: the sun being in
the wrong part of the sky, the jolting change to another schedule,
the violent wrenching of all expectation, as if I'd gone to sleep in
one season and woken up in another, with months of my life lost, and
the sequence of natural life destroyed. I have lost my place. It will
be days, or weeks, before I find it again.

I was too tired to read aloud to
Martha, so I turned out my light, and she stroked my back. Sleep
hovered for a while, and then backed away again. I was too tired to
sleep. After half an hour or so, I turned my light back on, and read
to her after all. The Truelove: we're getting into the later
novels of O'Brian's opus, when he begins repeating himself, and his
discontinuities begin to seem less like artistic daring and more like
senility. Tried to sleep again: same routine. No luck. Got up, went
out to the living room, made myself a sandwich, wandered about the
web. Around two o'clock, I saw that the light in the bedroom was on
again: Martha too was up and reading again. But at four o'clock, when
I finally felt able to sleep, the room was dark. I climbed in beside
her and fell asleep.

A couple hours later, the alarm: I had
rashly agreed to give Tory a ride to work at seven. So here I am,
done with that, having my coffee at Tom's, weighing the pros and cons
of trying to eke out another hour or two of sleep before work. Maybe.
We'll see. I've learned not to fret too much about sleeplessness, and
trying to predict when I'll be able to sleep. It will all sort itself
out eventually, until the next change of the clocks, when we'll get
to do it all again.

Of course, it's not all the time
change: that only gives the sadness and disorientation a local
habitation and a name. The current pulling me away is strong. Just
now I found a withering sprig of scotch broom in my pocket: slender,
ribbed, dark green, out of place.

It's always so interesting to me to remember that some of my friends are really impacted by the shift. I don't feel as though it makes much difference in my sleep schedule one way or the other -- it's no worse than flying to Texas to see family (a one-hour time change), and substantially easier in many ways.

Then again, I'm always delighted by the move to DST because it heightens the change that's already been underway -- longer days, more light, a hope that eventually the snow and ice will melt. (And I'm always chagrined by the return to standard time, which heightens the change that's already been underway -- darkening, more cold, that terrible and terrifying loss of the sun.) So I suppose it does impact me. Just not in terms of my sleep - it's all mood, all the way.